A blog exploring morality, politics, and religion.

Do non-human animals have morality?

Posted on May 18, 2011

In the Wall Street Journal, Stephen Budiansky is skeptical of a recent spate of books — most notably Dale Peterson’s The Moral Lives of Animals — that claim humans are not nature’s sole moralists.

What appear on the surface to be instances of insight, reflection, empathy or higher purpose frequently turn out to be a fairly simple learned behavior, of a kind that every sentient species from humans to earthworms exhibits all the time.